Despite “great things” in the House ObamaCare replacement bill, writes Avik Roy at Forbes, it contained “a fatal flaw”: It provided the same assistance to poor and the wealthy, pricing “millions of near-elderly low-income workers out of the insurance market” and trapping millions in poverty. The Senate bill, fixes that “with age- and means-tests tax credits up to 350 percent of the poverty level.” Bonus: It makes it easier to reform Medicaid — “the dysfunctional government-run health-care program for the poor whose enrollees have no better health outcomes than the uninsured.” As for senators who complain the bill doesn’t go far enough, Roy asks: “How often will you get a chance to make a difference for millions of your constituents who are struggling under the weight of rising premiums and exploding deductibles?”

From the right: Left’s Bullying After Baseball Shooting

Only a week after Rep. Steve Scalise was shot by a man targeting Republicans, he was “smeared by one national media figure and told his wound was ‘self-inflicted’ by a nightly news anchor,” The Federalist’s Mary Katharine Ham points out. Republicans were “scolded for not changing their views on the Second Amendment.” And much of the national media simply moved on. Ham is appalled that when a Republican congressman is shot by a “partisan attacker,” a big TV question was whether he had it coming to him. “It all revealed once again the overweening cultural hubris of the American Left,” which, Ham concludes, “can’t conceive of Republicans as victims even when they’re shot.”

Foreign desk: The Key Difference in Trump’s Afghanistan Plan

President Trump’s approach to Afghanistan is different from Obama’s in important ways, notes Eli Lake at Bloomberg. Most important, “Trump has no intention of ‘telegraphing’ an American troop withdrawal,” which, under Obama, was the prevailing strategy.” As a result, “the Taliban concluded they could wait out the Americans.” Trump’s plan will take “a regional approach” and call on surrounding nations for aid. It will also remove “strict caps, known as ‘force management levels,’ placed on U.S. forces in Afghanistan,” and give more control to the Pentagon. Only time will tell, says Lake, “whether Trump’s approach is different enough from Obama’s to get a different result.”

Non-profit watchdog: ‘Anti-Hate’ Group Is Fueling More Hate

Like journalists, the charity-rating agency GuideStar now relies on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s judgments for what counts as extremism. But Jeryl Bier argues in The Wall Street Journal that the SPLC’s views are skewed. Though it “rightly condemns” groups like the Ku Klux Klan and New Black Panther Party, it has slurred “mainstream groups like the [Family Research Council], as well as people like social scientist Charles Murray” — even as it “plays down threats from the left.” The group “arguably contributes to the climate of hate it abhors,” because its assertions fuel people like the Middlebury College students who attacked Murray, whom it falsely branded as a “white nationalist.” Now, GuideStar’s reliance on the SPLC “may further burnish its credentials as an unbiased arbiter of hate.”

Science desk: Explaining Where Babies Come From

The questions of where babies come from has perplexed more than just the parents of inquisitive kids, observes Edward Dolnick in the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, it wasn’t until recently that scientists knew the answer. Great men like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Galileo knew “men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies are created.” They solved the mystery in 1875, but today, new riddles abound. Scientists, for instance, are trying explain consciousness and how to distinguish it from the hardware that controls, say, a robot that “can find its way around the room … and play chess.” So “we shouldn’t be too smug,” warns Dolnick. “In centuries to come, our descendants will look back at us and quote our earnest beliefs and shake their heads in astonishment.”